Penguin Greetings is two products wrapped into one. Penguin Greetings is an engine for handling web "ecards." It is also a collection of 200 cards that can be quickly and easily installed into any server for an immediate ecards solution. In addition, another 24 card images are included separately in the Penguin Greetings - Four Seasons collection and another 16 note card images are now included in the Penguin Greetings - Savoring the sights of Seattle Collection. The cards are photo-based and are similar in style and taste to Apple's iCards content. To see the complete Penguin Greetings solution, go to the demonstration page.

The Penguin Greetings (pgreet) engine is a web-based greeting cards for LINUX and other UNIX-based systems written in Perl.  Penguin Greetings is template-based and shifts ecards to be more like email instead of web-only objects.  For flexibility and security, a separate daemon does the emailing and stores data permanently on the server.  Penguin Greetings incorporates the following features:

• Supports any number of ecard sites running on the same server. Each site is independent with its own configuration, database files, and HTML content. Localization/Internationalization is supported so that secondary ecard sites can be used to support multiple languages and regions. User ecard sites are supported.
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• Customizable HTML templates for both the ecards and creation screens so that the web content is completely independent of the Perl program.  Perl content is embedded using Embperl or now HTML::Mason so that the full power of  Perl is available to content developers and for server-side processing.  Object-oriented ecard sites can be created using Embperl::Object or Mason. At the same time, creating templates does not require any specific knowledge of Perl. Using Embperl or Mason, it is possible to build complicated ecard sites as demonstrated by the Penguin Greetings - California Poppy Collection. or the Penguin Greetings - Savoring the sights of Seattle Collection
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• Support for a persistent Perl interpreter via SpeedyCGI for robust performance under production loads.  Configuration and state information is cached in memory for improved performance under SpeedyCGI.   Retains support for standard CGI for portability.
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• Greeting cards that function more like email.  The announcement of the card includes the text of the card so that the recipient can reply to the message.  The email of the author is included in the email reply-to field so that recipients can reply to the ecard using the reply feature of most email clients.
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• Uses MIME multipart HTML formatted email to directly send complete ecards to recipients.
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• Automated installation procedure, including: the installation of CPAN modules not included in Perl 5.8.0, localization of configuration files, and installation of applications, configuration files, and a default ecard website.
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• Access to card creation can be limited to users stored in an htpasswd file on server for sites which want to have ecards available only to a particular group of people.
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• A separate application daemon to handle such chores as: card scheduling for emailing on a particular date, purging of old cards after a certain date, and backup database files.
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• A user agent separate from the user ID which the web server runs as for mailing and storing of data.  If desired, ecards can be emailed under existing email accounts on server.  Specific human users on the server can be given access to this feature via an access control list.
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• Extensive configuration options.  Including the location of configuration and data files, performance tuning, and content parameters.
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• Based on standard Perl CPAN modules for portability and reliability.
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• Extensive logging of daemon activities.
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• Six secondary demonstrations sites included with the distribution, Five of which exist in both English and French as examples of internationalization. Four use Embperl::Object to demonstrate object-oriented website building techniques and one uses HTML::Mason.

This page was generated from file description.epl.html which was last updated on: 5/9/2005